Limitations of Current Consumer Photography Technology
A film-to-video player responsive to instructions encoded on film is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,482,924 to Brownstein, assigned to the assignee of the present application.
Communication between the camera user and the photofinisher and a film-to-video player typically requires written forms which are filled out by the user, usually well after a given scene has been photographed. Thus, in addition to the inconvenience of filling out such a form, scene-related information is typically lost or forgotten. Such information may include the user's desire to not have a particular frame printed or to have several prints made from a given frame, for example. Such information may also include the Photographic parameters of the scene, observed by the user or by a sensor, which would have aided the photofinisher's classification of the scene to increase the quality of the prints made from the film.
Several factors reduce the efficiency of the overall photofinishing process. For example, in a large photofinishing laboratory not operating on a 24 hour per day basis, the film processing equipment must lie dormant for a period of time at the beginning of each work day until enough incoming customer film has been sorted to form one batch of a minimum number (e.g. 70) of film strips of the same type (such as color negative 35 mm film) to justify running the printing equipment. Of course, undeveloped film (regular customer orders) must be separated from developed film (Print re-orders).
These same limitations apply whenever the user wishes to communicate his desires regarding each image frame on his developed film to a film-to-video player. Such desires may be reflected in zooming, cropping, rotating, fading or character superposition of the video image of a particular frame. Currently, the user must manually control the film-to-video player to enter such instructions on a frame-by-frame basis.